


Pink (& Other Promises)

by leslielol



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Barisi Gift Exchange 2018, Christmas Party, Developing Relationship, M/M, Relationship Reveal, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-14
Updated: 2018-12-14
Packaged: 2019-09-18 07:01:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16990251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leslielol/pseuds/leslielol
Summary: “We should wait, ah, on telling anyone. Don’t you think?”Hand on his fly, Carisi blinks in confusion, then settles in, back at ease. “Yeah, ‘course. We could at least wait ‘til Friday, when we can talk about it more.” The fly goes up, and for lack of another assignment, Carisi’s hands rest on his narrow hips. “Christ, I wouldn’t know how to explain it.”“Can’t say I don’t like hearing that,” Barba murmurs, the words emerging warm and low from deep inside him.“What, my dumbfoundedness?”“Your awe.”





	Pink (& Other Promises)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [darkmoore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkmoore/gifts).



> For Darkmoore05 :) I hope you enjoy it! 
> 
> [Prompt: ...I also like it when the relationship is kept "secret" for a while. Or at least they think it is still secret.]

**September 4, 2018**

“I don’t have to work today,” Carisi says, nose pressed to Barba’s side. He keeps taking long, slow breaths through his nose, and releasing warm gusts of air between lazy, open-mouthed touches. 

Barba doesn’t know that they qualify as kisses; it feels like Carisi is mouthing at him, breathing him in, exhausted, because asking for anything more might just get it again. 

He feels some intermittent smiles, too. The cool, slick fronts of Carisi’s teeth being bared against the naked flesh of Barba’s side are alien, but delightful. Barba feels like he is witness to some grand new design, the sliced bread of men.

“Lucky you,” Barba says, the words rumbling low. Carisi, who has his arms looped impossibly around Barba’s middle, can undoubtedly feel the words flourish and churn as they form. “But I’m not going to be late to court because you think you’re getting a blowjob with breakfast.”

Carisi--whose lanky figure seems to allow him to be everywhere at once--tucks his chin over Barba’s shoulder. “So I could have one or the other?”

Barba stretches out of Carisi’s loose hold, then rolls back around the face him. 

“You can have what I’m having.”

Carisi squints, guesses, “...blowjobs.”

_“Coffee.”_

The pillow that’s tossed into his face is, admittedly, not unexpected. Carisi’s still grinning as Barba lifts himself out of bed. 

Carisi watches him stretch and bend to pick up a discarded pair of boxer-briefs. Barba knows he’s being watched--it’s why he plays at modesty at all. All the work he does to cover himself is all the more exposing; there’d be less to see if he’d done what he did every morning: walk from his bed to the connected bathroom, presenting himself only to the narrow confines of his shower.

“I’ll get outta your hair. You won’t be late, promise.” Carisi scoots comfortably into the spot Barba just vacated. “But I’m just gonna lay here for a sec, if that’s okay…” 

Barba turns, the briefs still low on his hips. He was going to say yes, anyway, but seeing Carisi embracing him--that ghostly warmth he’d left behind--still, and quite presumptuously, and without reservation, catches the word in his throat. Barba doesn’t get to say everything he means. 

“Fine.”

Barba showers quickly, attending to any residual stickiness on his body, first. He finds his own form feels unfamiliar after taking in another’s so fully. He scrubs over his torso and imagines Carisi’s hands there, then searches with his own for the firm planes and smooth features of the man he’d left alone in his bed. 

It all gets muddled, and Barba resolves instead to rolling his neck and take deep breaths.

He quickly realizes he doesn’t need the hot water to loosen his muscles; he’s plenty loose after a marathon evening and a languid early morning fondling. Carisi had awoken early out of habit--this much, Barba now knew without Carisi’s murmured apologies--and Barba had engaged him well before dozing off again. 

Barba suddenly isn’t sure what to do when instead of searching for peace, he already has it. It’s ever his wont, then, to wander. His gaze is lost first, and he quickly reaffirms his subject: Carisi, as partially reflected in the full length mirror on his closet door. 

Barba stills under the pressurized stream of hot water against his back. He sees that Carisi is still in bed. Not touching himself. Not asleep. He’s just smiling up at the ceiling with the same dopey look on his face he’d pressed into Barba’s side, earlier, begging him off work. 

He’s restless, and the more Barba watches, the more he expects Carisi to swing his legs out of bed and bid his body to follow. But his actions remain localized to where he said he wanted to be, right where Barba left him.

Carisi swipes a hand across his eyes at one point, and seems to laugh to himself. It’s his pale chest leaping up and down that gives him away, because Barba can’t hear anything over the steady drum of water and the thrum of his heart. 

Carisi sits up only to flop back down. He disappears into the soft grey and whites of Barba’s bedsheets, then gathers Barba’s abandoned pillow up in his arms and buries himself under it. 

Barba does an about face in the shower, and though he doesn’t lose his footing for the move, he’s left reeling all the same. 

Rather than satisfied, or empty, or concerned with a polite--if swift--departure, Barba realizes the most tangible expression blooming in his chest is akin to _goodness._ He feels _good,_ and is unsettled by the simplicity, there. Remorse isn’t creeping in where he’d been opened, shame doesn’t twist his arm into a shirt sleeve right away. Fear doesn’t have him refusing a parting kiss, lest he be recognized now, if never before.

And yet the opposite does not take effect. Rather than return to his previous form, Barba instead lingers, unafraid to be seen in his own skin.

He argues with himself the reasons for that are plain: Carisi isn’t a stranger, there is no gaping unknown as to his intentions. 

_He’s always wanted me,_ Barba thinks, a rash sentiment meant to buttress his confidence. Only, the smugness inherent in the notion doesn’t show itself. Barba does not deliver himself to haughtiness and self-aggrandizement--a wonder, given that he does this regularly for thinks far more trivial. 

A strange sense of fragility overtakes him as Barba slowly comes to understand why.

Carisi has always wanted this, and perhaps he’s not alone.

Barba realizes that after this--their third time sleeping together, and undeniably the most tender, most open--he is likewise smitten, by virtue of his feeling soft and content. He hasn’t given a great deal of thought to the past few days, beyond wanting it, liking it, and wanting more. Such disregard is entirely unlike him--he'd sooner analyze a thing to death--but Carisi’s lilting smile and hungry touch makes him forget. 

The first time came so easily: his disappointment with losing evidence in his case led him to a late night and a rushed, desperate embrace. The morning after left no time for overthinking--a miracle solution was found in old precedent and the case had cracked itself back open again. By midday it was all but won, and Barba took to Carisi again, after that. The mood had changed, desperation giving way to all the puffed-up smugness of a conquering hero. 

Then last night, victorious, Carisi had laughed at him, then drank with him, kissed him, and they went spiraling back to that strange, unbidden place they’d left not a day prior. 

And now. Asked and answered, Barba has Carisi splayed out in his bed, boneless and speechless. Barba remembers that vividly from the first night--the silence, taken in like a gasping breath. There were no questions beyond those few necessary: _Can I?_ and _Can you?_ Everything else sounded so certain. 

_Yes._

_More._

_Please._

He wonders, did it come so easily because they both had all this desire in reserve? There is undeniable--and he _loathes_ this term--sexual chemistry, and affection running deeper than that, for which Barba would be a fool not to have noticed from Carisi's end, and a liar, if he denied it from himself. He can’t figure why he isn’t more curious than he is. 

Barba settles on the strange fact of the matter: It feels too good. 

He shuts off the water, towels himself off, and thinks hard about how, in his life, all the right choices are hard ones. He decides _nothing_ is too good for clarity.

This certitude carries his steps into the bedroom, but it’s there that the warmth finds him again and he chickens out. He shuts himself off, away, procrastinating with a fresh pair of boxer-briefs and a white undershirt. Idling in them, words tied up well behind his tongue, Barba imagines himself as a monument to apathy. What breaks him open again is hearing Carisi sigh, contented.

“Carisi.”

“Hm?”

“Is this okay? You… you’re enjoying this?” 

Carisi sits up on his elbows and regards Barba warily. 

“Um, _yeah--”_

“On a scale of occasional hook-up to, ah,” Barba draws a blank. He hasn’t had much of anything beyond that, and doesn’t know how the vernacular might have changed for dating.

As Barba finds himself uncharacteristically at a loss for words, then overcompensating by providing far too many, Carisi scrambles out from under the sheets. He gets as close to Barba as he can without giving up this new territory he’s gained.

Carisi, hands out, palms open, urging calm, laps him once, twice, and then some. He winds up Barba’s anxieties and dispatches them thoroughly, saying, “Jesus, Barba, I’d marry you right now if you asked.”

Barba’s mouth closes with a deafening clatter of molar against molar. He suspects his eyes have gone wide, big and green and peeked out, but the seizure of all air from his lungs and the fact of his heart is suddenly accessing degrees of _horsepower_ take precedence.

As quickly as he was stolen up by his nerves, Barba is released. Regardless of what is demonstrably said, Barba knows exactly what he's been given: the upper hand. He relaxes and comes back into his own. 

On the contrary, while Carisi doesn’t fall over himself to take it back, he certainly looks stricken. His eyes search Barba’s, and there’s some relief in finding the same roguish glint in them as he’d seen night after night after night, now. 

Coolly, Barba responds, “Well, that’s… something to know.”

“Oh, shit. _Shit._ I’m sorry. That’s--okay, let me--clarify.”

 _That word,_ Barba thinks, and tries not to look gut-punched as Carisi takes it from his thoughts and wraps his mouth around it, a practice he is working to perfection. 

“The floor is yours,” Barba says, and wills himself to ignore the growing tightness in his shorts.

Carisi takes a breath--in, out, like he's preparing to face something terribly exciting. Barba is at once overcome with the impulse to hold his own breath in anticipation. 

Carisi straightens, then opens his mouth, only for nervous laughter to sputter forth. Barba feels like he's being yanked back and forth between a dream and reality. 

“Sorry, I’m so sorry, I can’t do this naked.” 

He practically falls off the bed in search of his clothes. Finding his t-shirt first, Carisi pulls it on, only to look all the more ridiculous for being naked from the waist down. 

His boxers are a generic green-and-blue plaid, probably the least offensive pair in a multi-pack. Coupled with the shirt and the bedhead and Carisi's striking looks, his adamant youth in the face of graying hair and permanent bags under his blue eyes, makes for a soothing and promising picture. Barba is drawn right back into the fantasy. 

Only, he's so very sure he's never had this one before.

 _A younger man?_ He likes to think he's better suited to men his own age, or older. Barba likes in himself what he likes in others: an established life and career, assured values and tested principles beset by lofty interests. He likes the reinvention he sees in men who were forced to grow up and away from boyhood too soon, who never forgot it, and came out the other side looking for others like themselves.

Carisi, in this moment, looks a little lost. He’s scrambling to gain purchase here, to fix himself into something that can mirror Barba, if only to have a conversation with him.

And Barba… he rethinks entirely what it is he's always wanted. Because in this moment, he wants Carisi's naked confidence back, wants his soft smile and unmitigated glee. 

And god help him, he even wants the straight-guy-boxers, too, but back where they belong: in a crumpled heap on his bedroom floor.

Carisi, sensing Barba's intense focus, offers an apology. “Sorry, I should have prepared.”

“I’m not expecting a speech,” Barba says, and in doing so hears his voice for impossibly gentle, which startles them both.

“Still, though. Something. I’ve kind of been… I really wasn’t expecting the last couple nights, you know?” A crooked, shy smile unfolds. “To say the least, I’m glad you called.” 

“You can hardly put this on me,” Barba counters, and the affront he feels is genuine. “I just wanted a few files. You suggested dinner and…” 

Barba makes an expectant face, but Carisi wears one to match. He didn’t get here by his powers of persuasion, and he doesn’t need to say so, because Barba knows he won’t get away with so generous an explanation. It was true, Carisi suggested a bite to eat after a long day, phrasing exactly as unimbued so as to pass clear by, had no one been looking to spot it. Barba _was_ looking, and more than that he was the one to take the invitation and run it to a candlelit table, soft music, and the obvious lie that the restaurant was nothing special, but the cocktails were perfection. 

(“And that's what I want,” Barba had said unashamedly on the night. “A good cocktail.”)

“It was a joint effort,” he huffs. Then, remembering what he’d interrupted--an explanation, it seems, laced with fawning--says, “Go on.” 

What Carisi does with his hands is wrongly assume his boxers have pockets to disappear into. He corrects himself as if Barba had admonished him.

“I’m just… glad you seem to like me. I mean, you wouldn’t very well have let me do some of that stuff if you didn’t like me.”

“One could argue I had you do ‘some of that stuff’ because I _despise_ you.”

Carisi throws his head back, and when he returns to form, he's wearing a smarmy grin. 

“What's that, a bit from your stand-up routine? And how about that airline food, huh?”

“Look who’s working on a tight five, himself.”

Barba purses his lips, then relents. He won’t force what won’t come. 

Because all during Carisi's labored hesitation, Barba grew very, very sure. 

He adores this man. That’s the word to match with all the wild things he’s feeling. It answers for the lack of uncertainty on his part, once he was in it. He’s not being foolhardy or lackadaisical with his reputation--he’s handed himself over, gladly, to be taken for a ride. 

And while Carisi rolling around in his bed is no secret from him, Barba cannot claim to know the depths of his delight. Does it run like fervent streams, side-by-side with the blood in the man’s very veins? 

Barba’s does.

“This is very new,” he says softly. It's not as though he cannot take that tone with others, but Barba feels he’s largely speaking to himself. “I don’t need a statement of purpose, we’re not being graded.” 

His heart is in his throat, and Barba chokes on it. 

Fear gets the better of him in that moment. Understanding what he feels arrives as divine intervention, but the backend is just as revelatory: he might be alone in this. 

“Forget I said anything. Go about your day.”

_“Rafael.”_

Carisi speaks his name so patiently and with such sweetness that Barba can barely stand it. He was struck, too, by the reverancy applied last night, though he believed himself unworthy of it. Still does, until--

 _“Oh,_ Rafael.” 

Carisi gives a raucous encore. 

He’s teasing. It’s a joke. He’s smiling wide and feeling himself, then _feeling_ himself, along his throat and chest, which have suddenly become quite warm. 

Barba makes a face, tries to smirk, but it’s too soft. And Carisi knows at once the power he has.

“Don’t,” Carisi says, barely a murmur. Barba can only infer what he means. 

Carisi starts to kiss him, to bring him to bed: a slow, backwards, breathless effort that ends with Barba pushed back onto his mattress, and Carisi lording over him, making space for himself between Barba’s legs.

He seems to have meant, _Don’t doubt me._

“This is what I’m talking about,” Carisi says, and sinks into Barba for another kiss. He pulls up, back, and seems to hover. Barba imagines himself outside the debaucherous scene, uncertain he believes it otherwise. There he is, remade clean and presentable for work, being kissed and touched and inched apart by loose, pale legs and arms, pink lips, and a mop of gel-crusted hair. 

Carisi continues, “I like this, and you like me.” Another kiss, this one so deep and unforgiving, Barba gasps for air once he’s able. “Do you want to know how I feel about you?” 

Barba searches the look in his eyes, the warmth of his touch. It’s asked and answered.

“If your quasi marriage proposal is any indication, no,” Barba snips, thinking if he can take back control of the conversation, his body will follow. “I’ll reserve that answer for a later date.”

“Tonight?”

Barba moves out from under Carisi while serving him a flat look, the kind that could slide across a table like a shot glass, and lose not a drop for the journey. 

“Next Friday,” he says, thinking he _should_ be thinking that they could both use some distance. A workweek is hardly a bird’s-eye view, but some perspective is better than none. Better than blinding himself with tunnel vision of this sometimes goofy, sometimes melancholy, entirely sweet, _completely perplexing_ figure of a man, surely. 

Barba needs to know that there’s something here he needs, beyond undeniable want and instant gratification. Carisi’s played sharpshooter and hit the mark in that respect, but it’s Barba’s instinct to wander, to doubt, to test a thing’s mettle. And, he decides, if in a week he still can’t help himself, he’ll reorient his thinking and give Carisi a little more leeway than he could a usual hookup.

He already knows he’s lying to himself. 

_Reorient_ is the word he uses about his drinking when he feels its effects a touch too acutely. _Leeway,_ too, when he wants to forget having ever felt that way. 

Carisi just grins up at him. 

“I mean, sure, if you can wait that long.”

Everything he says has the wild tone of a self-deprecating joke, and Barba can’t figure whether Carisi does this knowingly, if he’s aware of the desperation coiling in Barba’s stomach as he wills down the burning desire to earnestly agree, or if it's a genuine attempt to lighten that which is--at times--like a terrible fraught situation. They’re two colleagues, and theirs is a tenuous game, no matter how cautiously Barba sets up the pieces.

“I’m certain I can manage, Casanova,” Barba says, and takes a sojourn to his closet, where he selects--seemingly without consideration--an ensemble. Pink in the tie and socks, a charcoal suit, a vest with a silken red back. He continues to speak, languid as he puts himself together: slacks, shirt, suspenders, vest. 

It’s not lost on him that he’s all but giftwrapped himself. 

“Not so sure about you, though. You’re disconcertingly easy to excite. Should I wear a bell?”

Carisi lets himself watch, but the pink across his face suggests it's nothing like a choice.

“Yeah, because the squad needs to know that I’ll startle into a boner.” 

Then Carisi makes a similar effort, throwing on his discarded clothes, matching Barba button for button.

“That’s something else, though--” Barba wonders now if he’s entirely too late to his _play it cool_ scheme. He wonders if Carisi isn’t already of a mind about what they’ve done and how it should read-- _at all,_ or in neon-colored lights? 

“We should wait, ah, on telling anyone. Don’t you think?” 

Hand on his fly, Carisi blinks in confusion, then settles in, back at ease. “Yeah, ‘course. We could at least wait ‘til Friday, when we can talk about it more.” The fly goes up, and for lack of another assignment, Carisi’s hands rest on his narrow hips. He laughs, genuine and bright. The noise rattles through his frame, takes his whole body for a ride. “Christ, I wouldn’t know how to explain it.” 

“Can’t say I don’t like hearing that,” Barba murmurs, the words emerging warm and low from deep inside him.

“What, my dumbfoundedness?”

“Your awe.” 

The look on Carisi’s face gives him more of exactly that.

They do have coffee--Barba promised--and they kiss, Carisi against the countertop, Barba without spilling so much as a drop from his slate-grey mug. 

“That’s enough,” Barba says against Carisi’s mouth. They’ve done more kissing than not, and now his coffee’s gone cold.

Carisi’s tie goes in his pocket, and his vest remains open under his jacket. He has every intention of walking out of here, looking like exactly what was done with him. 

“Hey,” Carisi says, at the door because even Barba showing him out is one more brick in the tangible fixture he can point to, saying, _yeah, I was there._ “I thought of something, uh, for clarity's sake.”

He’s leaning against the door, head bent, shoulders loose, at ease. It’s an unnatural position and yet, visions of supple bodies in warm light amid Grecian paintings leap to the forefront of Barba’s mind, and it takes him a moment too long to stamp them down. 

How _embarrassing._

Carisi takes Barba’s hand, and for one terrifying second, Barba fears a reprise of his proposal joke, or worse--an out-and-out dismissal.

His concerns are unfounded.

Because there’s good sex and there's infatuation and there's what Carisi’s feeling now, happy and fulfilled and teased and adored. It all veers one way on the spectrum, tipping resolutely towards love. Carisi doesn’t know how to say as much, precisely, but he has to give it his best attempt.

“Thoughts?” Barba prompts when Carisi leaves him hanging. “You said you had some?”

Carisi blushes, but the tender smile he’s been lording over Barba never once falters.

“This here is something special. I know that much.” Carisi is sweet-faced, uncompromisingly sincere, and Barba is taken aback by how routine this all suddenly feels. He realizes now he’s seen this expression a dozen times, most of them well outside the past few days. There’s a pattern here, and Barba thinks if he can focus on those moments, all of them gleaming like polished stones along a dirt path, he can follow it back months, even years. 

But Carisi’s still talking, so Barba forgoes his quest to listen. 

“There's never good news I don’t immediately wanna share, but I get… this is ours, first. So there's more to appreciate of it, first. Right?”

“I promise you, there's more.”

There’s enough conviction in his voice to surprise Barba, but it doesn’t. _He_ isn’t. Surprised.

A little thrilled, maybe. 

Carisi nods distractedly; he doesn’t expect to be told--and resolutely so, no less--but hearing it sends blood rushing to his head.

“I figure time will… fill out whatever explanation we end up with.” Concerned he’s overstepped--which is becoming a trend, now, given his impromptu marriage proposal--Carisi adds hastily, “Um. If any.”

Barba looks from his hand, which Carisi is still holding, to Carisi himself, unshowered and hastily put together, uncertain but hopeful smile twisting the corners of his mouth. Barba’s own expression is wry and befitting of a man with the upperhand. It’s _his_ apartment, Carisi is there at _his_ invitation. _He’s_ the one who is smartly dressed and ready to resume his life. 

Yet it’s from his lips that the compliments are flowing, one after another, to offer assurances faster than he can make sense of accepting them, himself. 

“If there isn’t an explanation for _this,”_ he says, swinging their hands where they’re still clasped and met, “There is no god.”

“Blasphemy,” Carisi retorts, but there’s no bite to it. He frees Barba’s hand and stuffs his own down his pockets. Barba wants to miss it, but he can’t be disappointed. What he gets in exchange is just as sweet: Carisi’s smile, ducked and hidden, his gaze pitched to the floor, his eyelashes throwing slight shadows across his cheeks. 

The thrill Barba gets in seeing a man reduced to the lightest stirrings of his heart makes quick work of his puffed-up attitude, muddied intentions, and neither here-nor-there anxieties. They all swarm together then fall away as one. 

“But you’ll take the compliment,” he says, warming to the idea of all of this being exactly as it seems. 

Carisi wants to kiss Barba, so he does. It’s as neat a decision as that, as simple as it is ferociously profound. 

Barba, who tips forward--almost instinctively now, and when did he ever learn something so quick?--settles back on his heels as they part. He feels his brow settle into its more natural, more studious slope. He looks--really looks--at what he’s being given, what more is gamely offered. It’s vast and varied and as uncertain as ought to terrify him, but a calmness prevails. He’s not whipped into a frenzy, but swept away into a dream.

Carisi, aware he’s being scrutinized, takes a ready seat at the small end table near the door. There, he tugs on his shoes. He picks up his coat from the hook, untouched from where he’d left it early the previous night. 

That he's going to just _leave like that,_ return to the waking world smelling of sex and looking like he’d been turned inside out is a belated realization on Barba's part. Carisi intends to follow him out, to part ways with him on the sidewalk, happily ruined. He will walk around Barba's neighborhood--he might even ride the subway--looking like he does. 

And it's a delicious thought: _he has no shame._

“Carisi.” 

Barba opens his apartment door a crack, but cannot bring himself to leave this one thing unfinished. 

His face constricts in annoyance, and to his credit, stays that way. 

“Tomorrow,” he mutters, a surrender if ever he’s given one. 

By Carisi’s beaming grin, Barba is made acutely aware of how quickly he’s fallen, how that doesn’t scare him like it should, how he only frets when he thinks about how he ought to be fretting.

“You change your mind about tonight, Counselor, I won’t think any less of you.” 

Barba swings the door open and points Carisi through it.

_“Out.”_

-

**October 5, 2018**

“Barba!” 

His name is called not a second after he enters the bar. It’s followed up with an unceremonious, “Drink!”

It puts a sort of bemused smile on his face that he wears with some resistance. He’s not sure whether _Drink!_ was an order or an observation. 

Barba is right to be wary. As he approaches his colleagues, there’s no mistaking that only Rollins and Fin have their heads thrown back, grinning, drinks in hand. Benson isn’t there for the revelry at all, and Carisi has it worse: he’s there, but with his head ducked, face hidden in untold embarrassment. 

“The jury just came back half an hour ago,” Barba says as he saunters up to the bar. He doesn’t spare a look to Carisi, pretending instead that it’s the other Detectives who hold his attention. “What have you all been celebrating?”

Rollins is grinning wide in anticipation for exactly this--another of her ilk, a shrewd mind best equipped and most invested in dragging the truth from Carisi--but it’s only Fin who speaks to their revelry. The Sergeant claps a hand on Carisi’s shoulder, who groans unhappily in response and sinks his head further. 

“Carisi's getting laid.”

“Oh.” Barba swivels where he stands and looks upon Carisi, as if he suspects to find evidence strewn across his face. Carisi is out-and-out pink with embarrassment, but there’s nothing on his face Barba can claim to have put there. 

For his own, Barba surrenders nothing but a sharp smile. If he’d put a few away like Carisi seems to have done, perhaps he’d only _think_ to smother himself, hiding nothing by virtue of wanting to hide at all. 

He shares his smirk and decidedly haughty tone with Fin, asking, “And this is cause for celebration, not alarm?”

“It was more of a shock and awe situation,” Fin supplies. 

Barba wonders if Fin will ever know how close to the truth he is with just a joke. He supposes not, but the idea excites him towards further risk. He knows he could rise above the teasing, even help lift Carisi from it. One cool remark and he could free his lover from the intrigue, pardon him from questions. Something hot and snide and he could snatch Carisi’s name right out of their mouths, and replace it with his own. There would be short talk angled downwards and away, regurgitating old rumors and stirring up something new. He’d hear it all and preen.

Barba doesn’t do either. He doesn’t alleviate or distract the raucous tones because he’s altogether too tempted by the laughter, and with only a moment’s hesitation, finds himself revelling in the muck. 

“Champagne, then?” Barba asks, his expression deceptively innocent. He raises a hand, makes it happen. Soon Rollins and Fin are toasting flutes of champagne over Carisi's head, where it had been from the start--burning red, the pink long-gone, and buried in his folded arms on the bar. 

There is more laughter and joking, and Rollins’ finger--at some point--digging into the cherry-red of Carisi’s ear as he mutters and keeps himself hidden. She takes off with the bottle, Fin joining her to exchange celebratory swigs. 

They quickly forget whose torment scored them the favor, and it’s into that empty space that Barba moves. He leans casually against the bar, plumbing for nothing. He knows Carisi will come to him--they’re in one another’s orbit, now. All he has to do is wait, and the back of his lover’s head is nothing Barba can’t appreciate for its own unique beauty. 

Finally, Carisi peeks an eye out, and catches Barba smirking.

“You're an asshole,” Carisi mutters, though he accepts the flute of champagne Barba saved from the bottle. 

“Pink?” Carisi asks, eyeing the soft hue and the bubbles darting through it. 

Barba is of the distinct opinion he needn’t answer for his preferences, so he doesn’t. Instead he does the fantastic, cultivating an air about him that seems to spell out and pronounce for all those who might glance his way: _what, like you don’t want a taste?_

He raises his own glass for a toast, which Carisi--still red-faced and smarting--meets.

“To getting laid,” Barba says, and grins when Carisi draws his glass back, as if he won’t be party to something so uncouth.

“Asshole,” he says again. Sweeter this time, Barba thinks. 

“To assholes, then,” Barba pronounces, and brings the champagne to his lips. 

“I didn’t name names,” Carisi murmurs, his eyes bright and searching. He gets it in quick, hoping to catch Barba unawares. If he can say as much with no reply, then it is as it stands. Carisi can establish precedent, asked for and answered.

Of course, Carisi should have known Barba for a smoother hand than most. 

The toast remains unfinished.

“Let’s try that again,” Barba says, primly enough to start. All that disappears as he leans in close to touch his drink to Carisi’s, moving until both men and their glasses are practically parallel for the effort.

“To assholes,” he insists. “...getting laid.” 

Carisi laughs brightly and with sincerity like a sonic boom. The sound fills the bar and turns a few heads. Before God and bar flies alike, he takes a healthy swig. 

-

**October 21, 2018**

When she runs, Rollins stops for no one. 

She speeds right past guys trying to catch her eye. She can hurtle over hipsters crouching with their phones, eyeing Frannie as a subject for their dog-based Instagram account. There's only so much time in a day she affords to just herself, none of it squandered, all of it precious. 

She's known her instincts to take over in a bar or on the dance floor; she'll lose herself to studying a scene, logging faces. The fun drains from the experience as her focus shifts to what’s around her until until she becomes removed from it. And at that point, she’s on little more than a stakeout. 

That's why she's chosen this pert and pretty neighborhood settled along a shady and quiet street. It’s mostly fixed with old apartment buildings, and spotted only by colorful awnings over cute cafes frequented by locals. 

She feels relaxed here, not on edge or perpetually on alert. Frannie is tight to her side. The fall air is cool and new. As her mind begins to empty itself of all thoughts and menial worries, then set itself as secondary to the push and pull of her body, Rollins feels more like herself than she has in weeks.

She sees something--some _one_ of such familiarity in so unnatural a setting that the image is altogether _grave._ It’s the kind of recognition that feels totally out of place and time, like seeing the face of a childhood friend in a stranger, and despite not being recognized oneself, wondering after them for days on end. Thousands of miles and decades of years separate the worst of wondered-after faces.

This one, she only gives until the previous Thursday.

It's Barba, she realizes, sat at a tiny table on the patio of a cafe, sunglasses on, face unshaven, reading the paper, and dressed down--but no less strikingly--in a palomino khaki pant and a crisp white shirt, with chelsea boots the brassy, deep color of cognac. He seems to have curated his outfit from the sparse fall foliage punctuating the city blocks, plucking each warm tone to match.

He looks _good._ Good and a little miffed. His lips are pursed as he checks his watch and looks back toward the opening to the restaurant. He’s waiting for someone to join him, and neither his patience nor his pink mimosa can be expected to last much longer. 

Rollins doubles back down the street and crosses, tugging Frannie along. 

“Hey, Counselor!” she calls out, loud enough to garner his attention as well as that of several nearby patrons. “Lookin’ good!” 

He manages to seem rightly embarrassed by her spectacle, but only briefly. He recovers by lifting his chin a little, straightening his spine and sharpening his smile for those who look to gain confirmation. They get it in scores. 

She can push the line with Barba. She’s given him testimony before, the kind of deeply personal, incredibly painful answers to his questions that might have, under different circumstances, changed their working relationship, made it impossible to recalibrate. Rollins refuses to accept that he came away with the upper hand, and though Barba takes care never to act as though he has, she works overtime to put him back firmly into a place where she can match wits with him, lest he ever thinks to try. 

He’s seen her wipe away tears of shame and embarrassment. She knows _he knows_ that’s inherently unfair, so she can poke and prod and give a little back, even where it doesn’t matter.

“Rollins,” he greets, cool and detached as ever. He glances down at Frannie, who is nosing towards a piece of bacon dropped from an earlier customer’s plate. “And associate.” 

“Kind of hard to get stood up by your brunch date,” she says, eyeing the two spritely drinks, noting only one has taken any hits. “It’s usually the kind of thing you roll into from outta bed.”

His mouth twitches, and Rollins knows the smirk on his face has changed from bemused to perturbed. He’s seconds away from flustered, if she plays her hand right. 

“As ever, I aim to exceed your minimal expectations of my talents,” he counters, and though it sounds like a final thought, a thing to land on with a smile and part ways conversationally, Barba knows Rollins won’t allow him that. She doesn’t spare herself--or anyone--the illusion of ignorance. 

“My--”

“Associate?”

“--boyfriend--” he corrects, and despite the wrinkled nose that precedes the admission, after the fact he seems to find the taste of that word strangely pleasurable on his tongue. “--is at the farmer’s market. Because arugula can’t wait, but I can sit here and get pickled.” 

He gives her an expectant look, as if to say, _Is that what you wanted to know? See, you really didn’t have to work that hard. I am unbothered._

Rollins grins, delighted. 

“Sounds like a good time, honestly.”

Barba’s smirk becomes delightfully coy once again. He shrugs, admits, “It’s alright.” 

Rollins doesn’t stick around; she’s had her fun, and decides Barba could use as much of his as he can get. It doesn’t escape her notice, besides, that Barba seems unfamiliar with the term he’s used, and that wouldn’t improve in the next ten minutes, should his date return, and Barba find himself compelled to make the appropriate introductions. 

She’s rounding the next block when it gets into her head that she’ll need to break the news to Carisi gently. Try as he might, his crush on their ADA is nothing if not heavy-handed, overwrought, and tipping towards _pathetic,_ now, given that the man in question has himself a beau. 

And on the whole, it seems serious. 

Rollins counts off the pieces of evidence as her feet pound the pavement. 

Someone whose relations he’s had, but whose company he seeks.

Someone he outfits himself in casual chic for. 

Someone he likes enough to give their explanation rather than cast blame in their absence.

Someone he waits for, and eagerly so. 

This, Rollins thinks, may shatter Carisi. She decides then and there to bring donuts Monday morning, just to cushion the blow.

It’s some kind of day--one she’d surely have spent a chunk of her paycheck on lottery tickets, if she hadn’t been bucked from that particular bronco--because as soon as Carisi crosses her mind, he similarly darts across her field of vision. 

His hair is loosely styled, and his lanky form haphazardly dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, one sleeve pushed to his elbow, the other not making it as far. The kicker is a Fordham tote bag slung over one arm, packed heavy heirloom carrots, zucchini, and a twisted-off plastic bag filled with bright green arugula, all if it dancing in cheerful ripples. 

Rollins can’t quite name her immediate response. It feels like surprise, vindication, amusement, and abject horror spear upwards from her gut to her throat at exactly the same time; there’s no clear winner. 

She decides on amused (and a touch impressed). 

“Hey, Carisi!” she shouts at him from across the street and he turns, wide-eyed. She has every opportunity to purposefully hold him up, to dig in a few questions, perhaps catch him in a lie as to where he’s going and who he’s meeting. His _boyfriend._

Rollins sees his hands twist around the handles of his tote bag. He’s nervous, but starts to make his way across the street to meet her. 

She thinks about how he hasn’t said anything-- _how_ and _why_ he hasn’t said anything--and knows if he meets her now, if she allows that, he’ll have to decide whether he feels compelled to lie to her or not. The hows and the whys won’t matter then; there will be a lie or an admission, neither as forthcoming as they should be. Rollins doesn’t want either of them to choose that for the other. 

And because she’s feeling especially generous, Rollins won’t let Barba twist in the wind any longer, either.

She waves Carisi off, shouts, “Small world!”

Rollins is laughing as she breaks into a run.

 _Like hell_ he’s getting a donut on Monday.

-

**November 14, 2018**

If she’s honest with herself, Rita Calhoun knows she lost.

If she’s brutally honest, she knows she lost _yesterday._

The case was snatched up out of her reach by Barba’s cross, and when she’d heard he was out of commission--finally losing the weeklong battle with the flu he’d been engaged in--she thought she had half a chance today. She’s forced back the tide before--Barba’s words to her, once, at a bar some empty night. 

(She’d been smarting then, despite her success. “‘Of justice?’” she’d said, openly mocking her friend. 

He’d kissed her. It was back when they kissed, sometimes.

“You’re good, but you’re not that good.”)

He isn’t here, isn’t stood where his words had exploded from him, and from her client, and deafened the place. He isn’t pitching himself as an out-and-out eyesore, garnering looks first and then attention, soon after, as his intellect and cunning fill step in to engulf the piqued curiosity of all in his audience. 

And if Rafael Barba isn’t there to be seen, is he well and truly heard?

Calhoun fast learns the answer to this question. Even for being momentarily replaced by a petite, sharp-jawed, bespectacled woman of monochromatic fashions, Barba’s influence isn’t absent, and Calhoun doesn’t feel as optimistic as she wants. The previous day’s revelations only seem more damning now as ADA Walker reiterates the points Barba made yesterday. They seem to echo in Barba’s voice. 

It’s a lengthy closing statement, with Walker expounding on the case more than necessary, like a student who’s crammed for a final. Calhoun lets her gaze wander, and doesn’t mind if the jury sees her doing so. The ones she thinks she can still turn will be susceptible to such tactics.

In the gallery she spies the tall, graceless wonder: Detective Carisi. He’s been there every day of the trail, as is his wont when Barba is forced to pull out all the stops. The kid likes a show, and Calhoun can’t fault him there. 

She wonders what Barba will think when she tells him his shadow watches _every_ ADA will the utmost intensity? That his penetrating blue eyes play no favorites?

The idea of puncturing Barba’s ego--he _loves_ that he has so ardent a fan--tides her over. Then Calhoun does her due diligence for her client, speaking every word she’d planned since the start, allowing nothing of Barba’s arguments to derail or contradict her own. 

And still, she knows it. 

The jury files out to deliberate, and they’re as lost to her as if she’d set twelve midwestern tourists loose in Times Square.

Calhoun doesn’t take defeat in stride; she wants another fight, and _soon._ If Barba was here, she could at least accost him in the hallway, harang him about his “performance.” 

She pawns her client off to his wealthy parents, gives them every assurance, and steps outside for a breath of fresh air.

Even outside the courthouse, and with Barba miles away--ideally slumped over his toilet, battling the flu and a pulsing migraine for good measure--Calhoun cannot escape him.

“Hey.” Detective Carisi is leaning against the white stone of the courthouse made all the more brilliant by the mid-morning light. He stakes out a sunbeam as he speaks furtively into his phone: “Walker did good. I think the jury will deliver.” 

_Of course,_ Calhoun thinks. _**Of course.**_

The status of his case is giving Barba more grief than his walking pneumonia, and he’s tasked his adoring public to spy on the proceedings and report back. She has half a mind to snatch the phone from the detective’s hand and give Barba an earful. She’d hit him with the classics: how he’d never grown out of being a _controlling little snot,_ how his male fragility was showing, and was he at least down a few pounds, with all the vomiting? And perhaps she’d throw in something just for the detective, and accuse Barba of misappropriating NYPD resources, _such that they are._

She could get snide, be overly aggressive, even toss the phone over her shoulder when she was done. And she knew--at the very least, she knew!--that neither Barba, nor his stand-in, nor his errand boy, would have anything more to say.

Calhoun takes two steps on her Ferragamo heels towards that exact end. She has the detective in her sights when more of his conversation with Barba comes spilling out in tones more familiar, more tender, more… _damning._

“She did really well. I swear!” Carisi speaks with a smile widening each word. Calhoun knows this even from facing the man’s back. “Why would I say that to make you feel better when I’ve literally been trying to convince you to let me come over and make you feel better?” 

_Oh,_ Calhoun thinks. **_Oh._**

And the evidence just keeps mounting. 

“Like, soup. I know where my strengths lie.” 

She watches Carisi shrug easily at something Barba says in response. 

“Yeah, minestrone. I can also make a mean miso.” 

And to her utter astonishment, they just _keep going like that,_ Carisi slathering every word in powdered sugar and Barba _not telling him off for it._ It goes and goes, such to the point that Carisi is swinging a little from where a normal person might have hips, he’s so at ease. For that alone, Calhoun half-convinces herself that Barba must be wretched with fever, delirious, perhaps on his deathbed--because how could the brilliant, shrewd man she’d known at Harvard, battled in court, and taken to bed on occasion suddenly be into _this?_

“You sound a little less congested, anyway. I told you, my grandmother swears by lemon and garlic--” Carisi stops himself, winces. “That cough, though…”

Calhoun is pleased as punch Barba is apparently hacking up a lung. _It’s what he deserves,_ she thinks, for giving himself over to this, certainly, but then for keeping it from her entirely. 

Sure, she was going to namecall and demean him, first, but after that she fully intended to buy drinks and drill him for details. She’s certain if she doesn’t know about them, it’s by design, and not another soul can claim to be privy to their affair. Calhoun can admit that’s the smart choice, but the Barba she knows only _acts_ as though he favors propriety. He’d much rather gossip in confidence. 

And clearly, there is much to be said.

Just the way Carisi curls around his phone like he can possibly get any closer to the voice on the other end is a vision so mortifying, Calhoun cannot tear herself away. _Smitten_ is the explanation that comes to mind, an answer to this calamity as all-encompassing as _desperation_ or _boredom,_ but infinitely more unsettling. Calhoun wonders if, in light of this development, Barba isn’t actively looking for a way out. 

(Calhoun sizes up the lithe figure cut by Detective Carisi. She can help with that.)

“I’ll call you as soon as we hear anything. Try and get some sleep, huh?” Carisi laughs at something, listens for a spell, and finally stops his swooning. He goes very still, and Calhoun, who doesn’t consider eavesdropping complete without cataloguing and parsing the posture of her subject, fingers him for having been summarily dismissed. 

Perhaps the inevitable has occurred, and Barba has said something duly cruel. Perhaps the profanity of the mundane has finally wormed its way into the detective’s ears, and he realizes now how very _wrong_ this all is. 

What Calhoun expects to be a sorry finale is, in fact, a glorious crescendo.

“Hey, that’s new.” Carisi is practically twisting with excitement, and his cheeks have gone pink in addition to being wind-chafed red. “I’m just teasing--don’t hang up! …I love you, too.” 

“Well _shit!_ ” 

Calhoun’s loud, bawdy, and utterly exasperated proclamation gets the Detective’s attention. He whips around, finds her glaring at him, and cautiously keeps hold of his phone, like he thinks she’ll say something Barba ought to hear.

“Hey, Counselor…”

“No,” Calhoun interrupts. _“God_ no. Don’t you ‘Hey Counselor’ _me_ with that mouth.”

She leaves him on the courthouse steps, a million questions on his tongue, eyes owlishly wide, and an overall dumb look on his face Barba must see all the time.

 _Christ,_ she thinks, because she knows Barba must get a kick out of that.

Once she wraps her head around this match--it will take time, and vodka, and her best interrogation techniques applied to unwitting mutual friends--Calhoun suspects she will have plenty of words for Rafael Barba, not one of which she trusts to be funnelled through and passed along by the dulcet Staten Island tones of the man he-- _apparently_ \--loves.

That idea follows her into the taxi that whisks her away at the courthouse steps. It takes the empty seat beside her, and though she’s able to momentarily dismiss it in the lobby of her firm’s austere building, it finds her again that evening. It follows her home, watches her eat, and joins her in bed. 

To the best of her knowledge, Calhoun has been Barba’s most prevailing romantic partnership for the past two decades, and their relationship is perfunctory at best. She cannot decide if she’s more surprised Barba found the time for such dalliances, or that this appears to be nothing of the sort. Detective Carisi wasn’t the product of casting a wide net and sifting through the returns; he was, perhaps, obtained through deliberate and chosen maneuvers. 

Why him? Why all that? Why the offers of soup and opinion, why the traded _I love you_ s over the phone, where nothing was granted in exchange for such an admission? 

She supposes the answer lies in why they never became anything more than what the were: warmth and release where their lives were rife with solitude and tension. They’d shared only those golden moments, and nothing else. The rest, which is Barba muddled up and reassembled at his core--patience, unhappiness, oblivion, precision, endurance, fear, anger, failure--they’d stripped of themselves, left in suit jackets and on nightstands. 

She’s seen Barba in every incarnation, and never felt compelled to change anything for more than a night.

More damningly, she’s never wanted as much from him. 

Calhoun mutes the television, allowing some weepy drama to continue, seen and not heard. 

She texts to Barba, _[How are you?]_ and _[Reply if not dead.]_

He answers her quickly: _[Professionally fine, physically in tatters.]_ and _[Yourself?]_

She isn’t after pleasantries, so she skips them entirely and delves dead-center into her point. 

_[We should get a drink. Make it like old times.]_

Barba starts to type a reply, thinks better of it, tries again and eventually responds: _[A drink would be nice.]_

_[And what I’m being too polite to ask for outright?]_  
_[The fucking, Rafael. What of the fucking.]_

_[I’m going to have to pass up your generous offer.]_  
_[I’m seeing someone.]_

She replies with three peach emojis and a question mark. 

When Barba doesn’t answer, she follows up with a slew of eggplants--a real boon of a harvest.

 _[Must be serious]_ she writes when again Barba doesn’t take the bait.

 _[Yes. It must be.]_

He’s trying to be cheeky, but given what she knows, Calhoun cannot divorce the substance from his joking. Because this is where she could catch him, force his hand. With the right words he must deny her or not, and she’ll have an answer either way. The questions are there, begging to flit from her fingers, a ticker tape parade for one: _Anyone I know? Where did you meet? Tell me more._

And maybe, if they were having this conversation in person, and she could torment him first hand, she’d give it everything she has. Perhaps this day--its loss, spoken for in every way but from the foreperson’s own lips--has taken its toll. Perhaps she knows her client for what he so decidedly is, and perhaps that is starting to grate on her conscience. Perhaps she sees her friendship with Barba as less tenuous than their clashes in court might suggest. 

Or perhaps she’s just going soft.

She writes only, _[Well let me know if his dick isn’t doing it for you, and I’ll strap mine on.]_

_[Goodnight Rita.]_

And again, Barba goes back and forth on whether or not to give himself away. Text, like a thought, hums to life and falls silent in equal turns. Eventually, Barba crafts the lawyerly response, a perfect sentiment of truth-and-not. Calhoun barks out a laugh for reading it, assuaged now of her idling thoughts that this is nothing Barba doesn’t want, because he’s certainly taking pains to protect it--logistically, practically, and in as far reaching terms as his own vocabulary. 

_[I’ll formally introduce you two some time.]_

Rita Calhoun expects nothing less.

\- 

**November 27, 2018**

It’s not that Fin thinks Ken won’t believe him if he says, tomorrow, that he left the Rangers tickets in his office locker. Ken would probably even laugh and make a crack about Fin going senile in his old age. 

But he’s better than that, now. Better than excuses and detours and rainchecks. It’s been tough, but he’s been working at it. 

A midnight run to the office after he’d left it not four hours ago is the epitome of _working at it._

He uses a roundabout entrance from the parking garage, and hopes to enter the precinct without being seen. He’s a Sergeant now, and what he’s gotten for it is roped in on some piddly shit he was doing back as an Officer, because someone of his rank told him to. Now it’s all coming back up the chute, so Fin keeps a low profile in the hope of getting home within the hour.

The tickets are where he left them, stuck under a magnet in his locker, with a pink sticky-note written in Rollins’ hand, _DON’T FORGET ME!_

They’re tucked into his wallet and in two minutes, he’s ready to head back home. 

Walking through the hallway, Fin can’t help but notice how quiet the precinct is. He hears people cough and move around, heavy footsteps taken slowly, the hum of the vending machines and cops contemplating their choices within it. He doesn’t trust that kind of silence, because he knows damn well it’s only ever a precursor to such terrible noise. 

Fin hears Carisi laughing in the bullpen--not a natural thing for the graveyard shift, but not the worst he’s ever heard. It’s just six steps back and around the corner, and if Carisi’s preoccupied already, he might not try and talk Fin’s ear off for the next hour. Fin decides to chance it. 

He doesn’t get through the doorway for the sight. It stops him there, even goes as far as to back him up a step. 

Fin sees Carisi at his desk, lone little island that it is in the bullpen, leaning forward and grinning around a plastic fork stuck in his mouth. Carisi’s been known to stare lovingly at zeppoli, so the fact that Chinese food might make him laugh is well within the realm of possibility. What startles Fin is the fact that Carisi is not there, sat at his desk, laughing at Dandan noodles alone. 

Barba is parked comfortably on the edge of the desk, ass planted atop a stack of papers Carisi isn’t going to get to, unless the wants to lose the hand that goes for it.

Unless…

The realization comes slowly, but carries with it a cavalcade of details. And once it arrives, dropping every conclusion like so many armfuls of luggage, it’s all Fin can do not to marvel at how fully he’s enforced his own blindness.

There’s evidence going back months, at least, but for the sake of his own pride, Fin considers only today: The checkered shirt Barba was wearing that morning remains, while the suit itself has been traded for jeans and boiled wool jacket. This isn’t some late-night he’s pulling, having swung by, files in hand, only to partake in Carisi’s too-large order of dim sum for his troubles. 

Barba had gone home much earlier and come back much later. His dressed-down attire placed him, Carisi was the motive, and Fin had stumbled upon a crime scene.

Fin knows Carisi took the shift to cover for Rollins, waving off her insinuations that he had anything better to do. She was of the mind he was seeing someone, and though she often tried to rope Fin in on the chaos of office gossip, he always abstained. 

A lot of good that did him. 

Because miracle of miracles, it seems Carisi did have other plans. It's all the more apparent that they've come back around for him, and brought takeout.

They feast under the shadow of suspects and victims, their pictures penned to a dry erase board timeline with a lot of blank spaces. 

Fin remembers the in-kind visits made by Kathy, the long-suffering wife of Detective Elliot Stabler. Sometimes by herself, sometimes with their gaggle of children in tow, she’d bring him a hot meal or a clean shirt, or hell--sometimes just the kids themselves, when a case kept him one too many nights, and they began to cry and ask questions. 

Stabler was an outlier in that regard. 

Fin couldn’t imagine his wife--before the divorce--bringing him a meal, let alone Ken. That was his doing, he knew. Isolating them like he did felt practical, especially during his stint in Narcotics. There was nothing he wanted his family to see of him there, nevermind being seen themselves. The plan was to come home and be a different version of himself for them--every rookie cop’s idling fantasy, and Fin had indulged just the same. But his humanity--and more importantly, that of the woman he’d loved and the child they’d created--quickly eluded him. He went too far into the dark and couldn’t turn his back and again see their light. 

His failure to compartmentalize himself at home sent him deeper into the work, where at least he was the kind of person who could carry the human toll. 

His wife, realizing he’d cut his losses, did the same. 

Fin has Munch to talk to about the distressing nature of the job; they were partners for over a decade, there’s nothing but unfettered territory there. He doesn’t breathe a word of it into his love life, now, fleeting and imperfect as it is. Fin isn’t thinking so far as a lifelong partnership--he has that--but just a little sweetness and generosity to carry him from week to week. 

To allow for both in one holy body is to renege on his only survival tactic: drawing a line in the sand and denying a person entry. _No more,_ he’s said to his wife. _Stay back,_ to his son. 

Fin knows this sentiment is used and abused to explain away every office romance for which proximity is the driving factor, and terms like ‘understanding’ and ‘wavelengths’ are tacked on for decoration.

But it happens often enough that Fin cannot doubt its merit. Some of the sharpest people he knows can be dulled by a tender touch, and convince themselves of anything to allow for it. So Fin knows well enough that keeping his opinion to himself won’t cut it: he’s better off not having an opinion at all, because when people accept what they want, they do as much as they think they need. 

It’s a funny system, but such is the human capacity to excuse misbehavior and rationalize risk. 

Fin has seen it when people refuse, and deny, and object. They become too adept at compromising, because maybe it keeps some mistakes off the books, even for inviting countless others. He thinks of Stabler again, but it’s not Kathy he denied. He thinks of Benson, who denied him right back, but embraced others: Cassidy, Cabot, Haden, Tucker. He thinks of Amaro and Rollins, who were bound to run roughshod into _something,_ and were lucky enough to strike into one another.

But again, Fin maintains he doesn’t have an opinion about all that. 

He only goes by what he sees, and Barba’s still wearing his jacket, which means he doesn’t intend to stick around. The empty containers in the bin by Carisi’s desk, though, suggest that ship has sailed. 

It’s appearances they’re concerned with, then. And when there's fewer prying eyes, they’ll indulge in all the rest.

Fin thinks about it, considers how easily he could be misreading things here. 

Then he sees Carisi's dopey smile go wide where Barba's sharp one shrinks as he refuses to bear it fully, and one thought prevails above all others: _If they’re not, they should._

A second look tells him, _in what world are they not?_

Fin doesn’t watch, but he sees.

There’s still space between them, but it’s being tested: Carisi is leaning back, Barba is pitched forward. It’s a hair’s-length of deniability, and Fin sees it like dust streaming through a beam of light: what keeps them apart is nothing concrete. Under a harsh lens it becomes apparent, even startling. Given a kinder gaze, there’s nothing amiss. 

The space between them is open, but only inasmuch as it is waiting to be breached.

It’s after midnight, so it’s not unexpected that Barba would be feeling the great breadth of the day across his back and through his chest. The problem is, he hides a yawn by turning when Carisi twists around to answer his landline. Fin is spotted and before he can think of what to do--what to say or not, how to process the situation, whether to play along with whatever excuse they strike on, or open with the truth right out--Fin acts. 

He waves, not in greetings, but good-night. 

It’s a vague gesture: an open hand, flat, raised. He cocks his head a little, angling it the way he means to make his escape. He slips into one of his better tricks of the trade--the no-teeth, strained sort of smile white people do when they want to show they're too busy for the rest of it, but polite all the same. People seem to respond to it.

His face is otherwise totally unreadable, impassive, as if nothing at all had caught his eye. 

In one fleeting moment, he can see Barba’s eyes widen and set, watches at his shoulders snap back and his spine straightens. 

_Dude’s squaring up,_ Fin thinks, amused, but it seems Barba tempers those instincts, because the last thing Fin sees before he clears the corner is Barba’s hand, similarly raised. 

Flat, vague, unoffending. _Hello-goodbye._

They’ve acknowledged one another, and the rest--for which neither Carisi nor Barba has made comment, and Fin _most certainly does not have an opinion on_ \--is exempted. 

When he gets back to his car, Fin again checks that he has the tickets he came for. Maybe Ken’s right, and he really is going senile. 

And if he is, won’t he forget this? Catching two coworkers sharing a meal is nothing, except when it’s everything. Might as well enjoy it while he can. 

Driving off into a little unfettered territory, he texts Munch, _[The natives are getting restless. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow at the game.]_

Fin supposes he can send Ken and Alejandro for some beers, and fill Munch in. He can’t have a crowd; he’s not a gossip, after all.

 _[Inquiring minds want to know]_ Munch writes back, and the incoming call is immediate. 

Fin grins and swears--a warm, affectionate _motherfucker_ \--and answers it.

This _still_ isn’t gossip, Fin decides. Munch’s is an impartial ear.

“Jesus, man, don’t you ever sleep?” Munch has some smart remark that barely even registers anymore; Fin has heard them all. “A’ight so get this…” 

-

**December 17, 2018**

It’s rare that are were able to take a sit-down lunch, even in a place such as this: a cozy, over-warm cafe packed with tiny wood tables at which some single patrons were forced to sit with others, a practice done by both parties by refusing the glance up from their meals or phones to witness one another. This is a common practice, a means of imagining privacy even if none is to be had. It's performative and largely useless; there are enough familiar faces from the precinct that Rollins and Carisi may as well have taken their sandwiches back to the break room. 

But it’s fun, listening to teenagers talk politics, watching an old couple read to one another from the menu items they think the other might like. No doubt the busy servers aren’t too pleased with their sticking around, but Rollins and Carisi can’t help it. There’s simple good in the chaotic scene, and just seeing it at all is reason enough to indulge. 

It's all too soon that they crumple up the brown paper their sandwiches had come wrapped in, and set back out into the chilly afternoon. 

They're not a block from the cafe when Carisi stops, distracted. Rollins goes half a block more, chatting away, without noticing his absence. 

“Sorry,” Carisi says, sheepish. “Window shopping.”

“Oh, yeah?” 

Rollins doubles back to the storefront Carisi had lagged in front of. It’s menswear, and judging by the assortment, it’s nothing cheap. 

And it’s _Barba,_ in mannequin form. The patterns and colors are mixed and matched to an alarming degree, and she’s almost certain he has that exact pocket square, but in chartreuse. 

Rollins fights the inclination to hang her head; Carisi’s refusal to clue her in is getting ridiculous. She can’t figure he doesn’t trust her with the information--long ago he’d told her about his crush, and a slew of subsequent lies about being well and truly over it. 

“Who for?” Rollins asks, and, in figuring it’s just as foolish to pretend she hasn’t got Carisi figured out as it is for Carisi to think he’s being coy, goes for broke: “You get Barba in Secret Santa?”

“We’re doing Secret Santa?” Carisi manages not to give himself away in a paper bag, and almost sounds dejected for not being included.

Rollins rolls her eyes. 

“Who, then?”

She’s surprised it’s the follow-up that trips him; they do this all day, every day. Any good lie _must_ have a plausible follow-up, and it must rest at the tip of one’s tongue, always.

“Uh, my dad.”

 _Ridiculous,_ Rollins thinks again. _Abso-fucking-lutely ridicu-fucking-lous._

She folds her arms and makes sure he sees her eyeing the display. 

“Your dad wear a lot of $100 tie clips?”

“I was just lookin’.”

Carisi all but takes off from the spot: sure, he sways, tries to make his body meander for the decision, but his long legs can’t fool anyone. This, here, being pinned down by Rollins’ gaze ahead of some heretofore unspoken aspect of his life, is nothing he wants. His first, best choice is to disassociate himself from it.

“Alright,” Rollins says, then all but shouts after him because his stride is that much greater than hers: “Good luck finding something for your daddy!”

The brilliant shade of red that peels across Carisi’s face and neck is, in fact, quite festive. 

He stops dead on the sidewalk. People approach and pass him. Couples part ways; he is fixed to the spot like stone.

Rollins takes her time getting to him, and circles him when she does. He looks pink all over, and miserable. 

“Okay, okay,” he huffs, hands clearly fisting in his coat pockets. “You got me.” He looks her dead in the eye, and it shocks her--genuinely--that she recognizes this hasn’t been their _normal_ for a long time. 

“I’m seeing someone.”

Rollins throws her hands up. _“No kidding!”_

Then, because she can take his silence for what it is, and read into the stiffness of his shoulders, the chewing of his lip--he doesn’t like lying to her. Rollins decides she won’t ask who, won’t force that much from him without hearing first his explanation as to why his silence has been non-negotiable. 

She diverts, allows him to breathe, and asks: “And?”

He starts walking again, this time taking care to allow for Rollins to go in step with him. 

“We’re still kind of… figuring stuff out.” He winces. Another lie. “No, okay, we’re past that too. But it’s been really nice? Like an extended honeymoon phase. And really--really good, really… unlike me… to have something private, something just between me and another person. Like, I’m not posting polls to the group chat with my sisters, asking if this thing or that thing is weird.” He laughs at himself, them sobers. “Not to have anyone’s opinion ahead of my own has been, I dunno, a relief.”

“Yeah, Carisi, most people manage that without treating their love life like a state secret.” He still manages to look grim, so Rollins allows him one more consolation: “I guess I don’t know your sisters.”

Carisi is quiet for a time, and Rollins knows what he’s going to say before he says it: “It’s not really them I’m worried about.”

He doesn’t want to tell her what she’s probably figured out: that he’s thirty-two years old and terrified to come out to his parents beyond the hypothetical ground he’d laid in his early twenties. He fears, deep down, that it’s not wrong of them to think he’d grown out of it, given the last decade he’s spent trying to do exactly that. 

“It’s really good,” Carisi repeats, quietly, mostly for himself. Then he razes a hand through his hair, hand smoothing down to rest hot against the exposed back of his neck. His other hand has shelved itself on his hip, and Rollins knows the stance for pure distress. He’s confused, and it’s as if he needs his body to mirror the dissociation going on between his heart and his head.

It’s a wonder, then, that he manages to put it all into words: “It’s really, _really good,_ and I’m afraid someone I love is gonna see it and tell me it’s not. I’m afraid of what that argument is gonna be.” 

He's 6’3”, hunched, and still somehow manages to look impossibly small, having said what he did.

“Tough call, I guess,” Rollins says, suddenly not feeling as equipped for this battle of wits as she had imagined, previously. “Choosing between family and--”

“It’s not a choice,” Carisi interrupts, but nothing as fierce follows. Instead he squints as the clouds break overhead, and bathe the cool afternoon in welcome light. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and shrugs; he doesn’t know yet how to be any other way than overcome. “But it’s probably getting kinda ridiculous, huh?”

“Oh, I don’t know if that’s the word I’d use…”

Rollins bumps into him as they walk, and he takes her elbow in stride. 

“Sisters, parents…” she shrugs under the weight and mass of her scarf--a recent birthday present from Carisi, no less. Simple in style, but beautifully crafted with delicate stitchwork. She doesn’t have to think too hard as to whose opinion he got on the purchase. He of heated-diaper-caddy-fame did not arrive at the gift alone. 

“I get it, I do. Tryin’ to please people your whole life only gets you crushed under the weight of their expectations. But you’ll drive yourself nuts, overthinkin’ shit.”

He looks like he wants to be convinced. Rollins is more than willing to try.

“You can start small, you know? With people who don’t have that kind of… unintended power.” She looks right at him, but he can’t bring himself to do the same. His gaze has finally softened, though, and Rollins knows what she’s reaching towards is there, pitted inside him. He’s putting the pieces together as she lays them out. 

“Friends,” she suggests. “Co-workers.” 

“Thanks,” Carisi says, ducking his head slightly. He’s gone pink again, Rollins sees. “I’ll do that. Soon. I promise.”

She knows she’s made progress, knows Carisi will bury this thought and uncover it later. He might even think through what it is he’s afraid of, if anything, and conclude that his imagined outcomes are outlandish, that what he’s done here isn’t identify a fear he ought to have always had, but concoct one, because he’s conflated his relationship with the secret in which it is enveloped. 

And she has some sympathy for him, there. He may be a little in over his head. He may even be--

“I love him,” he says, cutting clean through Rollins’ thought.

_\--confused._

The floodgates are open, and for the gorge Carisi’s dug with his non-answers, suddenly there is an ocean, rising fast and pushing Carisi towards higher ground. He floats to the top, crests every wave, and seems suddenly to see the world, and himself, and her, from a vast new perspective.

He’s _so sure._ It’s invigorating. 

He rambles, speaking into his increasing levels of certainty, even if the words aren’t polished and the sentences a little frayed. The sentiment burns through him faster than he can corral with good sense, and the permanent cloud of hot breath parting from his lips is testament to silence he’s been keeping. 

_He’s kind. He’s funny. He’s sexy as hell._

_I wanna stress that he’s kind. Really, really kind to me, and to others, but really kind to me, which… okay, we’ve circled back around to sexy, again._

_And so smart, you know?_

_I don’t think I’ve ever been more sure of something--of someone--in my whole life._

Rollins listens patiently through it all, smiling because Carisi is, and she can’t help but do the same. Until she can get a word in edgewise, this is her only means of conveying her happiness for him. Admittedly, she wonders all the while if Carisi would be speaking so freely if he thought she knew exactly on whom he was laying such lavish praise. 

She decides to test that theory, asking, “This prince charming have a name?”

Carisi’s mouth snaps shut. There’s something he isn’t supposed to do, and _won’t_ do now. He supposes he’s come out marginally on top, keeping to the letter of the law, if not the spirit. 

Rollins flashes a sharp smile and gives Carisi’s cheek a pat. Those days are numbered. 

“Not all at once, huh, Romeo?”

-

**December 19, 2018**

It doesn’t strike her at the coffee cart outside the courthouse steps--she’s known something is up for months, now--but that’s where it becomes unavoidable. Barba is practically _giddy,_ and it’s a grossly apparent, deep-seated joy that has its roots in the new. He’s not above letting himself feel the rush of a big win, but even with the case they’d just put to rest, Benson knows Barba is entertaining a baser delight. 

Barba will toast one-too-many to justice won, but he won’t bury so sweet a smile into the lip of his coffee cup for it. 

His attire doesn’t help his self-satisfied case: he’s been favoring shades of pink lately, in his tie, his pocket squares, his shirts, his suspenders. Pigment rises out from the earth to color his socks. Benson knows to read too much into his clothing choices--there’s a whole methodology there, she’s sure--because he’s wont to chuck the system, and therefore cannot be trusted. 

(She learned this, of all things, after a week of him wearing tones of bright, brassy orange, and for finally asking why, saw him get flustered. A store clerk had told him it wasn’t his color (and made to purposefully embarrass him, Benson gathered, though Barba did not admit to as much), and Barba disagreed beyond mere example, but to the point of changing his coffee route to pass by the shop on _multiple_ occasions, specifically when outfitted in the offending color.) 

The pink-- _this pink_ \--is nothing so overpowering, but decidedly soft, threads darting in and out, forming tiny flowers, punctuating designs rather than commanding them. 

Above all things, Benson thinks it looks _nice._

They walk, as is their custom, through a nearby park. The leg of it puts Benson closer to the precinct, and Barba gets in a literal victory-lap before doubling back to return to his office. 

She lets silence invade their easy conversation. It settles there, not unwanted, not even unusual. For them--for their friendship--silence is as natural as breathing. 

That’s why Benson feels compelled to break it. Barba is keeping his own secrets, he set the tone first. It’s there, like a layer of black ice below the snow under their feet. Worse, there isn’t a doubt in her mind as to _whom_ his high spirits can be attributed. 

Weeks ago, after some played-out legal argument or another in the precinct-- _Matlock for the cheap seats,_ as Rollins had termed it--she caught Fin’s eye, certain he’d seen what she had. It was his dull nod of confirmation that answered her unspoken follow-up: _Are you seeing this?_

Fin might as well have told her, _I’ve read the book, seen the teaser trailer, watched the movie, picked it on my Oscar ballot for the office pool._

At the time, she felt a little foolish for not realizing how their dynamic had reversed itself. Suddenly it was _Barba_ who couldn’t keep the other man’s name out of his mouth, and _Carisi_ who was doing all the teasing. One colossal shift deserved another. 

Some part of her refuses to believe what she hasn’t been told by Barba’s own admission; everything _she knows_ she knows feels like gossip otherwise, and she respects Barba too much for that.

So she intends to find out, right from the source.

She does this with practiced ease, asking if he’d like to come to her place and celebrate Christmas with herself and Noah--here, she doesn’t skimp on the buttery details: _there’ll be hot chocolate and a turkey dinner and terribly darling homemade gifts_ \--or if he has plans. 

It’s a distinct choice, worded so as to merit her a full answer. 

Barba only betrays himself for the one second he takes to pause before he answers, “Your Christmas party? Of course I’m coming.” 

Benson presses, “I mean Christmas day. Unless you have plans. I know your mother is out of town.”

Barba’s lips part while his eyes narrow. It’s a teat trick. 

“Do you,” he replies, nothing like a question. 

Benson gives a shrug and a smile. “We talk.”

“ _Should_ you?” Barba says, in much the same derided tone. 

Benson sips her coffee, and doesn’t answer him that. It’s his secrets they’re getting at, not the smattering of texts that constitute the strange friendship she’s struck with Lucia Barba.

“If you don’t want to, that’s fine.” She thinks she has him, but throws in one last blow, sure to knock him off his decided course: Noah. “I know Christmas with my six-year-old probably isn’t top of your list of things to do. I didn’t think it would be outranked by _nothing,_ but…” 

“I’m seeing someone,” Barba says, and it’s not in the voice that should accompany the warm smile he’d been wearing, earlier. He says this much definitively, knowing he was not caught so much as purposefully hunted. “I adore your child, I’m not avoiding you, I’m just seeing someone.”

His exasperation hits the cold air first, breaking against whatever invisible wall stands just ahead of him, always an inch from his face. And perhaps it’s what saves him. 

Because finally, his tone changes. It heals itself, as light heals all things. And so he begins again, generously, “I’m seeing someone, and it’s still… new.” 

If Benson feels bad for prodding, she finds herself forgiven with the warmth of Barba’s answer.

“I’m very happy for you.” 

_Both,_ she thinks but does not add, the connotation too familiar. Still, Barba hasn’t told her everything. 

“It’s nothing I’m ashamed of,” Barba continues. The emptiness trailing Benson’s statement speaks for itself. She means to have more to say, but Barba’s withheld it all. “It… I haven’t really dated much since my late twenties. Early thirties.” He waves a hand, indicating everything Benson knows just as well for herself: ambition got in the way, and work, the occasional depressive spell and every reason not to try. In the past ten years, the best he’d done was fine by his dwindling standards: a few one-night stands, some idling through apps, some old flames in much the same romantic lull. He’d made it so that nothing ever _felt_ impossible, it just _was._

“This feels different. This feels… like that. He does.”

Barba adds that last qualifying term because he realizes he hasn't, yet, and Benson knows, or else knows not to be surprised.

“He makes you feel thirty again?” Benson jokes, but Barba doesn’t reply in kind.

“He makes me feel hopeful,” he admits, and Benson can’t miss the weight of that statement--what it means to have gone without it in any regard, least of all matters of the heart. 

Barba continues, his stream of consciousness unleashed and unbidden now that he has some free reign to speak of the grand scheme he feels has affixed itself to, then cracked open, his whole life. 

Love, it feels, is a pair of bottle-nosed pliers snapping rigid bone to free its marrow. 

“...And unencumbered. And happy. And not at all as foolish as I’d expected.” 

Benson is smiling at him by his end, and Barba recovers himself with another sip of coffee. It’s bitter enough to curl his lip, which it his intention. 

They’ve traveled through one end of the park to the next, and from its mouth the drum and slick of the city streets reemerges as the dominant landscape. Barba and Benson stand at the very edge of both worlds, each knowing the other for wanting and unfinished.

Barba has to answer for both.

And while he knows this, it still strikes him how difficult a thing it is to describe. His own happiness feels alien on his tongue. 

“It’s just…” Loathe as he was to admit it, Barba lands on no better word than, “nice.” 

The sentiment stirred warm within his chest, always. Being accosted with unnecessary kisses to his cheek, his shoulder, his wrist, whenever the skin was bare and barred to him in passing was nice. Being held overnight such that he awoke tangled in limbs and bedsheets was nice. Being told he was beautiful as his body betrayed his hunger for the sustained grip of another person--not even by their hand, but their interest.

_Being wanted--_

There was, in fact, nothing nicer. 

He tried to make tangible those thoughts too dear and too sweet to break into open air. It was so tender a thing, and the world so harsh. He felt himself flounder, even as he spoke what felt right enough to share, without giving himself away: “To have something… good, without questions--or opinions--as to why.”

“I understand,” Benson says, and the relief on Barba’s face is palpable. Admittedly, she can’t tell whether he’s relieved at her understanding, or her interruption. She puts a gloved hand on his forearm, prompting him to lower the coffee cup he keeps raised high and at the ready. He can’t hide from her now, and she fixes her gaze into his.

“And when you’re ready to celebrate what you have, I hope you know you won’t hear any opinions from me.”

Barba asks pointedly, “And questions?”

But even as he speaks to his doubts, his lip twitches towards one of those smiles Benson had seen earlier. She is heartened for its reappearance, and gives him one back.

“That depends on how long you hold out.” 

-

**December 23, 2018**

It’s not an _office_ party, per se. 

They’re all colleagues in some form or fashion, talking in and around their work, and looking some ways like they’ve not quite left it. 

(Rollins checks her phone religiously for the first half hour, explaining she’s waiting for word from TARU on a case. Barba does much the same with respect to a pending warrant, though he likes to think he’s more subtle about it.)

But these aren’t people who only know one another tangentially, or through one lens, pert and professional and static. There’s too much intensity and pain in the work they do to keep those facades up between themselves; all that effort is afforded to the victims. There have been times Rollins doesn’t make it to the car before she has to cover her mouth, to hold her anger back physically. Carisi’s been there when she can’t manage it, and she swears and grinds her teeth into a scream. 

Benson, for all the fight in her, exudes a certain kind of deafening silence when she is forced to accept failure--be it from the justice system, humanity, or herself. Barba’s found himself dwarfed in its shadow, unable to stand up against it. He’s learned from experience just to _stand it,_ and keep by her side. The pall is cast over them both, but they can sense one another’s stalwartness, at least, in the dark.

No, mere colleagues don’t often share such moments. Both Barba and Carisi are convinced they are in the company of something more, something lasting by means well beyond time. 

Which is why separating and positioning themselves like boxers in opposite sides of the ring feels like an unhinged performance. 

They do it because it seems like the practical response. But then, Barba makes a witty observation and expects to hear the comment’s first laugh directly from his right, where Carisi ought to be, lazing back against the couch, his limbs loose and splayed, unafraid to brush against Barba’s own. From the first, he’s disappointed. 

Because instead, they sit across from each other, at different--no, rival--sides of the room. A table separates them, the food and drinks on it making up the jagged terrain. But there’s no passing through or stopping short in their line of sight; you’d as soon as be close-lined.

They’re strung together, tethered. The evening progresses and they’re fast to reconcile the distance, with each smirking over one another’s jokes, smiling for hearing the start of a familiar story. At work, they’re not rooting about on such a level playing field. In either the precinct or the courthouse, there are titles and objectives to separate their time and attention. 

In cafes, on park benches, and nestled away in their respective apartments, there’s none of that. Placards fall away, and Barba still feels like he did on that third night, into morning, when he understood himself so clearly, and fortune favored him well enough to understand another. 

And since that revelation, they’ve both found it strange to be shuttered away from someone so dear in a space so small.

In truth, they don’t fare well. 

Barba thinks it’s all the _talk_ he’s been privy to. He can foresee all the whispers echoing by means of a foghorn, clumsily and heavy-handed. 

Carisi thinks this is only the inevitable, finding them at long last. He’s nervous for that, if nothing else: the expulsion of choice from his narrative. He imagines it playing like a much-anticipated twist in a reality show, sees reaction shots and nothing of his own self reflected back to his audience. And worst of all, Barba is on the cutting room floor. 

He’s found happiness. What will become of him if it gets the loser’s edit? 

Because his problem is this: he doesn’t which which is crazier, _telling_ people that he’s fallen in love with Rafael Barba, or the fact as it stands. 

And then the troubles double over, and quadruple in size, because he realizes that’s the least of his problems, because if and when he is found out, the worst of it will be the not having _told_ anyone. There are implications wrapped up in secrecy that people--friends, loved ones--find impossible not to heap unto themselves. 

He glances at Barba, hoping to intuit something in the crease of his brow, or the twist of his lip. _Some_ thing to tell him _any_ thing about how to feel. Carisi finds he can do that now. When in doubt, he can look to Barba for what is acceptable, moral, and right. 

He finds Barba’s already set his sights on him, the same mixture of warmed-over shame churning itself through his thoughts. He smiles by the end of it, though, offering the promise of reassurance given all ways but vocally.

So Carisi settles back in, relents to good company and generous food and drink. 

It’s maybe half an hour later when they’re all collectively loosened up that Barba realizes it: _everyone sees._

Everyone _knows._

Benson. Fin. Rollins. They’ve been intercepting glances this whole night, tilting their heads back to avoid the line of fire. _That’s funny,_ Barba thinks for all of a split second, before realizing he’s seen as much for _weeks,_ if not _months_ now. 

A wave of panic rolls once through his blood, causing his whole body to shift, but it passes, calms, because Barba sees that’s not the long or short of it. 

Everyone knows, yes. But then, everyone understands. 

Because nothing is being said, nor shouted, nor wound up in conspiracy. There are no winks, smirks, and nods. They are seen and recognized, and studiously not commented upon.

Their colleagues are _waiting._ Some more easily than others, but they accept that neither the timeframe nor the task is their own. 

Light from all their warm, knowing faces seems to converge on him. Barba’s had one too many to feel embarrassed. The place he’s at now, under different circumstances, would lead him to sheer fatalism, but here, among friends, he’s confident. He’s certain. 

If there’s nothing hidden, there’s nothing still to hide.

He thinks this, decides it, and hopes Carisi forgives him if he’s in the wrong.

It’s like coming for himself: he holds a blade to his own jugular as he stalks over crossed legs, the corners of tables, Rollins’ dog Frannie, mounds of Noah’s discarded toys. Each step is tenuous but his grip is firm.

His purpose is vast, his process simple. 

Get up. 

Cross the room. 

Close the distance between himself and Carisi. 

Take his rightful place. 

The imagined knife--which midway through his trek felt more like a battle ax--is now little more than a toothpick. 

The couch whines under his weight, but Barba cannot will a more graceful approach. He’s waited long enough and is, he realizes, exhausted from the journey.

The way that Carisi stares at him, as awe-struck as ever, makes it worth every hoot and smattering of teased applause.

“Hey,” Carisi says, quiet, as if there is still a level of privacy to maintain. Barba unfurls his arm across Carisi’s shoulders, fingers brazenly grazing the hair on the back of his head as he does.

“We weren’t fooling anyone,” Barba says, sounding tired but happy. He flexes his hand and is infinitely pleased when Carisi misses nary a beat before raising a hand as if to pat himself on the back, but instead laces his fingers with Barba’s. Barba can scarcely fathom the feeling of pride blooming warm in his chest at the ease for the display. 

The chatter--resumed, as it was--rings itself deaf in his ears. He hears only his heartbeat and Carisi’s, feels them unmistakably through twinned grips. 

Fin is saying, “Kind of like putting a hat on a hat, but okay.”

Rollins is twisting around the snap a selfie with the pair in the background, which she joins with an explanation-point-ridden text to Amaro. 

_[!!!!!!! Why do you ever doubt me? ¡¡¡¡¡¡¡]_

Noah, who’d climbed out of bed and into Benson’s lap not ten minutes ago, is sleepily asking after the applause, having joined in without understanding why. 

Benson is sweeping her son’s errant locks back and answering him kindly, “We’re just happy that your uncles Rafael and Sonny are happy.”

It doesn’t all register for Barba; he’s busy watching Carisi take it in, all of it, gladly and with such relief that Barba feels it coursing down his back like airflow from a speeding car. Finally, when Carisi catches Barba’s eye, he gives a silly jump of his eyebrows and a sidelong grin, all as if to say, _Well, that was easy._

“Why the attempted secrecy, huh?”

Rollins grins while she awaits an answer.

Fin, thinking he has a jump on the answer, chimes in, “No offense Barba, but I wouldn’t clock this as preferential treatment.”

“Offense taken,” Carisi quips. “I’m a catch.” 

Fin considers this. To Barba, he amends, “I take it back. This is community service on your part.” 

“We’re very happy,” Barba says over the masses, offering only a dull and dutiful piece of commentary. It’s the truth, and that’s the most they could ask for. “Thank you.”

Carisi still must be stunned, because he nods in agreement but does not leap into the conversation with all the vigor of which their company knows he is fully capable. Rather, he seems too content for words.

(Barba’s seen him that way before. He might very well be the only one who has.)

Carisi gets a bit of his own back, later. When they’re setting up the table for a no-holds-barred of a meal, Carisi draws Barba away to thoroughly kiss him behind the partition wall separating Benson’s kitchen from her living area. There’s a connecting pilar to provide height and width enough to cover them, but that’s as far as Carisi’s penchant for precaution goes; Barba’s head knocks unceremoniously against the fixture, so it’s not subtle, but Carisi isn’t going for that. He’s propelled by necessity.

They steal away again after dinner, before dessert and coffee. Carisi offers to take Frannie for a quick walk down the block, and Barba ducks out ahead of him, pretending his services are needed to hold the door. 

Carisi smiles as Barba’s first instinct is to fix the errant collar of his jacket. 

“Coming with?”

“Into the cold and the dark to wait for a dog to shit?” Barba pockets his hands, his job done. “Not on your life.” 

He smirks, because that’s what the joke calls for. He watches Carisi struggle to hook a leash to an excitable Frannie’s collar. Barba thinks he should have tried when they were still in the apartment, when the promise of what was to come wasn’t on the dog’s own tongue. 

Now, she’s too far gone. 

“Was that okay? What I--”

“Yes.” Carisi’s head snaps up and meets Barba’s gaze. He steadies, holds. He means to show there isn’t a moment of hesitation, no wrong moves, no miscalculations. Not now, and not then. 

“God, yes. I knew I wanted…” he opens his hands, closes them, like he can’t grasp mentally, verbally, or physically the thing he wishes to say. “It wouldn’t have been right, to wait any longer. To tell our friends.” 

Barba rests against the doorframe, tries to look the picture of relaxation even for the thrumming of his heart.

“I think they’ve known for a while.” 

“There’s a lot of detectives in that room,” Carisi says by way of agreement.

“An oversight on my part.”

“You need some more clueless friends.” 

Barba’s hand reaches out to rest on Carisi’s waist, then collects the man’s own hand from out of his jacket pocket. He runs a thumb thoughtfully over the knuckles and long, elegant fingers. 

“I have everything I need.” 

Carisi ducks slightly, but Barba knows he’s smiling sweetly by the way his eyes very nearly close, and his eyelashes ghost over his cheeks. He’s embarrassed to be held in such esteem, and while it’s something Barba has every intention of working it out of Carisi’s system--through diligent, repeated example--he can’t help but enjoy how shyness looks on the man. Carisi wears it like he means to throw it off, a threadbare t-shirt when life’s own invitation calls for a tuxedo. 

(Barba imagines tearing off the former and dressing him up in the latter.)

Then Carisi’s face contorts somewhat--his nose wrinkles and he bares his teeth a little--and Barba determines he looks positively guilty-ridden.

“I told Rollins I was seein’ someone,” he admits, thinking he surely played a part in their non-reveal.

Barba shrugs. “I told Liv as much.” 

“And, uh, Rita Calhoun might have overheard me on the phone with you, once…”

“Fin saw me sitting on your desk, practically eating out of your hand.” 

A laugh is startled free, and Carisi runs a hand over his face, chasing after it. His anxiety is like a skin he’s shed. He feels like bits and pieces are clinging to him, and he wants the fresh start he’s promised himself.

He steps to Barba, takes him in: the crisp white shirt he’s wearing, which manages to look formal despite its simplicity, is open at the throat, revealing some errant chest hair as well as a glimpse of the chain that holds his tiny crucifix. It’s more of himself than he’s wont to show, but Carisi knows precisely when that second button was flicked open, after Barba did away with their secret. 

The black jeans are something he’d had to be talked into, because Barba thought the combined effect had him looking like a cheap waiter. Carisi’s insistence that they showcased his ass magnificently--Carisi’s word--won the argument quick. 

(The flamingo-pink socks and the eight hundred dollar Chelsea boots also do their part to dispel that particular imagery.)

He looks--

Carisi smiles.

He looks just as he did that morning. After they’d lazed around in bed, had coffee, wrapped presents for Carisi’s niece, and Carisi cooked a few sides for Benson’s party, which was all done in joggers and a threadbare tee, there was this, the finished product. 

With Barba already backed against the door, there’s nowhere for him to go, and Carisi never tires of the fact that they fit so nicely together. 

“Were we ever really tryin’ to keep quiet?” Carisi asks, then bends down to nip at Barba’s throat, like he’s taken too long with his answer, and Carisi means to charm it out.

That only delays Barba further.

“Might save ourselves the embarrassment if we said that was never our intention.” 

Carisi thinks on that, and decides, “This doesn’t change how good anything of it was.”

“No, it does not.” 

And then Barba’s kissing him, but it’s nothing like payback for what Carisi sprung on him in the kitchen. The kisses are drawn in and out like breath, the motions sweet and timeless. Barba means to touch, taste, and indulge--shamelessly, even--with no mind for the company he’s abandoned. He knows, intellectually, they won’t be left to wonder why he’s gone, the answer is woefully apparent. 

He means to linger.

“Rafael,” Carisi breaks away, and the grin that normally tugs at the name isn't struggling to conceal itself; it’s there, center stage, under a spotlight. Barba thinks another string of kisses is immanent, but Carisi's goodness prevails. 

He gestures with Frannie’s taut leash. 

“This is animal abuse. I gotta go.” 

Frannie whines in agreement. Barba relents, and Carisi is still smiling as the elevator doors close.

Barba doesn’t expect to be cornered after darting after Carisi, but it's something he thinks he ought to get used to. 

Benson asks with no preamble, “Were you making out with my detective in the hallway?”

“So what if I was?” 

It’s cheery and unapologetic, but Barba starts to roll up his sleeves and edge in on dish duty all the same. There’s still some part of him that thinks he ought to be on his best behavior. 

Then there’s some part of him that just can’t help himself. 

“Have you got an opinion about that?”

“You know what I think?” Benson asks with a swat of his hand. The party is far from over, and the dishes can wait. “I think you got off easy.”

“What,” Barba says of her cheeky smile. “You were expecting a press conference? You think I should open the floor to questions?” 

“Just one,” she says, and much the same as with her smile, she teases the stem of her empty glass of cabernet. Likewise, she lets Barba twist in the wind as he considers her options.

Asking after disclosure forms is a waste; she’s certain he’s had them prepped and ready, signed if not dated. There’s no need to ask if he’s happy--she can see that he is. He gets that small, sad smile on his face, as though his wires are crossed and he’s confused ecstasy with anguish. Sometimes it _is_ anguish, and his smiles are dyed-in-the-wool misery, but the defining factor in this case is his eyes: they’re bright and focused, and in constant search of a scene. Benson imagines they are alike in that respect: where something is precious, it must be remembered to be believed. 

Questions are for what _might be,_ and she already knows what _is,_ because she's seen it blossom for months, and now it’s been brought into her home, bandied about like a ball in play, with everyone seeing some courttime. 

She’s glad Barba decided to call it, ultimately. 

And she’s glad Carisi didn’t so much as blink, because he’d seen this ahead of him in his dream of dreams: a happy, easy place to fill, out in the open but surrounded--no, safeguarded--by friends. 

Benson accepts Barba’s offer when he raises a bottle of Cabernet Franc to fill her empty glass, and toasts him when he’s done. She expects him to mirror the gesture in its grandiosity and smarm, but he doesn’t. He isn’t even inclined. It strikes her that he looks _serene,_ which is some kind of feat. In all the time she’s known him, Benson would--at best--place him content-adjacent. 

The rest of her docket is cleared.

_He’s happy, isn’t he?_

_It’s about time, isn’t it?_

_You really love him, don’t you?_

So her question isn’t really that; it arrives confident and sure, another thing to which she believes she already knows the answer. 

“Next year at your place?”

-

**December 24, 2018**

They don’t leave the party until after midnight, having traded jokes and wine for stories and coffee. 

Barba doesn’t realize it until Carisi draws his right hand up to wipe tears of laughter from his eyes--Fin has stories enough to share across a thousand midnights--but they’ve been holding hands, quite comfortably, for some time. 

His hand, though empty now, is warmed, pinked from constant contact, and seemingly drawn in a half-curl, its natural shape reoriented in favor of this fantastic new design. 

Carisi’s hand returns to his in a gesture that, for all its alien connotations, feels ruthlessness natural, primal in a way Barba would rather refuse, because when things become innate, they lose meaning. It’s choices that define them: allowing themselves this tenderness; plotting stake posts into the ground and defining the length and breadth of the shared fixtures in a life; telling people and not. 

“Hey,” Carisi murmurs, tipping his head back and reclining into Barba in a way that suggests coffee hasn’t kicked all the alcohol from his system, yet. Even sidelong, he seems to have heard Barba’s thoughts prickling at his ear from where they were stomping around Barba’s mind. “Get out of your head a minute. Join the party.”

Barba opens his mouth to voice some sharpened line or another, but closes it, choosing instead to fix Carisi with only a soft, agreeable smile. 

The tales tell themselves. 

No explanation was ever needed.


End file.
